Few- to many-body physics with ground state bosonic NaK polar molecules

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The project aims at producing high phase space density samples of ultracold polar molecules. In order to achieve that, Na and K atoms are brought into the molecular ground state via photoassociation processes. In this second project phase of the research unit, we plan to improve our efficiency of the molecular association process by employing 3D optical lattices, which should allow us to produce high phase space density samples of the molecules while at the same time minimizing molecular loss processes. In addition, we plan to explore novel evaporative cooling strategies of polar molecules in optical lattices. Such novel cooling processes could prove to be crucial to further improve the degeneracy of the molecular quantum gases and thereby bring them into a regime, where many-body physics of long range interacting quantum gases becomes accessible. Exploring such novel quantum phases and their dynamics is one of the long term goals of the project within this research unit.